Monday, November 26, 2012

Niki de Saint Phalle’s Shooting Paintings became increasingly performative in their second
year. Capitalizing on a background in both theater and modeling (she had graced the
covers of Life and Vogue as a teenager in the late 1940s), the artist was well positioned to
add even more bite to already-provocative works.
Saint Phalle began to engage in a highly orchestrated performance of her public self,
aided in no small part by her new “shooting costume”--a form-fitting white body suit that
became the defining garment for all shooting sessions. In her white suit and black boots,
Saint Phalle was the exaggeration of femininity--virginal yet simultaneously sexualized.
The femme fatale aspect of her public persona, meanwhile, was often heightened in
staged photographs in which the artist, with bright red lips, aimed her gun directly at the
viewer. Speaking of the Shooting Paintings in a 1966 Vogue interview, she acknowledged
this manner of dressing as a deliberate strategy and went so far as to call her body a
constructed visual creation like her sculpture.

Catherine Cabeenphoto by: alan kimara dixon

The spectacle of her body became a
dominant component of the work.Comments in the popular press and arts journals revealed the extent to which the artist’s
beauty was a central preoccupation: “Miss Saint Phalle cut a sharp figure in her ‘shooting’
bit” (Art News); “Through the room stalked the attractive white-suited figure of Niki de
Saint Phalle, booted, paint-flecked (perfectly)” (Arts Magazine); and “Pow, Bam-Bang,
Zip, went the beer and pressurized paint cans as comely virgin-garbed Niki de Saint Phalle
pulled the trigger...[in her] calculated discreetly feminine shots” (Beverly Hills Times, also
featuring an image with the revealing caption “Niki de Saint Phalle creating (sic)”).While Saint Phalle indeed capitalized on her body in a way that some later feminist artists
reacted against, Saint Phalle celebrated it, using the clash between her beauty and the
violence of the Shooting Paintings to confront accepted notions of femininity. As Saint
Phalle moved on from the Shooting Paintings, women’s bodies continued to be an interest
for her, but her focus shifted away that of her own body and towards rotund, mid-frolic
sculptural figures she called the Nanas. Her work calls attention to the troubling aspects
of beauty and sexuality, tied as they are with power and the pressure to conform to
certain societal ideals.Fire! gives us an opportunity to contemplate the links between this
historical body and body-of-work and the world of dance, where criticism
continues to have a particular interest in the body and beauty of the performer.- Nancy Stoaks, Fire! Dramaturg

About Catherine Cabeen

Catherine Cabeen, MFA, is an artist and teacher. Cabeen is the Artistic Director of Catherine Cabeen - Hyphen, a performance company that was founded in 2009 as a forum for creating dynamic, interdisciplinary performances that engage the body as the intersection for ideas.
Cabeen has received choreographic commissions from On the Boards, Donald Byrd’s Spectrum Dance Theater, TWU, the Visa2Dance Festival in Dar Es Salaam, the International Dance Day Festival in Byblos, Lebanon, Pig Iron Theater Company, and the Cabiri, among others.
The New York Times has called Cabeen’s Hyphen, “highly kinetic, complex... visually exquisite,” and “beautifully performed.” The New York Times, May 13, 2011.
Cabeen is a former member of the Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (1997-2005), and the Martha Graham Dance Company, among others.
She currently performs in her own work, and with Richard Move. Cabeen is also an Assistant Professor at Marymount Manhattan College and a regisseur for the Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.
For more information see catherinecabeen.com